


Now That I've Gone Too Far

by necrosweater



Series: Little Sunshine [4]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Bullying, Chem Use, Chem Use Without Consent, Compound-Swears, First Meetings, Humor, Multi, Original Raider Characters - Freeform, Original Scavver Characters, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Raiders, The Combat Zone
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-24 04:23:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13803324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/necrosweater/pseuds/necrosweater
Summary: Before Mickey met MacCready, she had a run-in with a certain rowdy Irish broad. In obvious Mickey Cochran fashion, things go... spectacularly.The crowd goes mad, roaring loudly enough that the dog whines slightly, pressing against Mickey’s side. The woman glances up at a gnarled and disfigured man in a suit for a moment before releasing the pool cue and kicking her opponent savagely in the side of the head, once. The thrashing stops, but Mickey can just make out slight breathing movement in his shoulders. Someone’s going to wake up feeling like shit warmed over.She supposes it was inevitable that she’d stumble upon some sort of post-apocalyptic fight club in the wasteland.





	Now That I've Gone Too Far

**Author's Note:**

> It's been 84 years...

When Mickey first walks into the defaced old theater, she has to stop to regain her footing for a second. She’s got that weirdly unsettling feeling of going to a familiar setting and seeing nothing familiar. She can picture perfectly the ornately decorated vintage style theater from over 200 years ago, when she and Natty would go out on dates. She can also clearly see the vandalized wreck of this formerly elegant place, what it’s been turned into.

Where there had once been a smiling ticket attendant keeping an eye on moviegoers and theater attendees from the booth, there are now a few raiders bound and gagged. Rule breakers, according to the painted words slapped on the walls.

Mickey doesn’t feel bad for them, not after her first introduction to raiders at the Abernathy Farm.  
She thinks she should probably feel bad about how the raiders have fucked up the formerly beautiful historic building, how what used to be a luxurious seating area now smells of spilled blood, spilled booze, and piss. She should probably feel bad that she blends in enough with the unsavory crowd that no one has immediately attacked her. In fact, no one has taken notice of her arrival. Instead, she’s just thankful to see a stocked and manned bar. She shoulders her way to the counter, the dog at her heels, and slaps a handful of caps on the dirty counter.

“Whiskey.” Grunting a few syllables at a time isn’t how she’s used to ordering drinks, but it works. The bartender sweeps her caps into a jar behind the counter and replaces them with a dusty bottle of something brown with a faded and crinkled label—barely legible as some cheap pre-war rail whiskey—and a smudged and chipped glass.

It’ll do.

Mickey ignores the questionable glass, and walks with Dog over to an empty table. She roots around in her pack for a moment and finds a bowl, a can of pure water, and a cracked but clean highball that used to say “ _Tangled Up In Blue_ ” a lot more clearly on the side than it does now.

“Have a drink on me, pup.” She pours the bowl full of water for the dog and settles in at the table, unscrewing the ancient lid to the whiskey. She tosses back a few slugs before heaving a sigh and taking a look around. What used to be the stage is now a fenced in cage, gaudy stage lights whirling around as a red-headed wastelander bare-fist brawls with a much larger man wielding a pool cue. The smaller fighter takes a blow to the midsection, almost doubling over before landing a solid punch to the larger man’s elbow, causing him to loosen his grip on his weapon. She grabs ahold of his pool cue with both hands and swings her body to the left, catching her heavy-booted foot on the back of his knees. She continues to wildly beat her opponent about the face with one arm, kicking at his legs while he attempts to shake her loose of the pool cue. Eventually she wears him down, finally knocking them both to the ground with an especially swift kick to the back of the knee. After a brief floor-bound scuffle, she slips out of his grip, blood dripping down her chin from the river pouring from her nose. She smiles brutally and hooks the pool cue around his neck, holding it tightly against his throat with either hand, straddling his thrashing shoulders.

The crowd goes mad, roaring loudly enough that the dog whines slightly, pressing against Mickey’s side. The woman glances up at a gnarled and disfigured man in a suit for a moment before releasing the pool cue and kicking her opponent savagely in the side of the head, once. The thrashing stops, but Mickey can just make out slight breathing movement in his shoulders. Someone’s going to wake up feeling like shit warmed over.

She supposes it was inevitable that she’d stumble upon some sort of post-apocalyptic fight club in the wasteland, and tosses back another glass full of whiskey. The stale vaguely whiskey-flavored liquid burns down her throat, and she laments the lack of fruit bitters and sour-soda in the apocalypse. Maybe she could find a liquor store that hadn’t been completely destroyed and try to find some bitters at least. God, she missed a properly made drink. Mickey stares woefully into her glass, pondering the state of her life, when she sees the red-headed fighter stumble up to the bar, patting a filthy rag to her busted nose.

“Barkeep,” the woman slurs, voice a bit garbled with the rag covering most of her mouth. “C’mon lad, just a lil’ somethin’ to wet me whistle between fights? ‘m thirsty, can ya spare a glass, please?”

The bartender keeps doing what he’s doing, which appears to be messing with something under the counter. “No can do, Little Bird, you know the rules. Boss said nothing for you until the end of the night. Doesn’t want you fighting sloppy. Gotta keep a good show going. Be a little theatrical, maybe by the end of it he’ll decide to give you something extra.”

The woman growls a little bit, swiping a canister of water offered by the man, and slinks off, muttering under her breath. Mickey stares after her for a bit, pondering the current state of her life, and wondering if it would be better or worse should she decide to join in the apparent gladiatorial battles happening in the ring. She packs away the remainder of the whiskey, rolling it up with the highball in some old copies of the Boston Bugle before casually ambling over to the bartender. The dog looks after her with his uncannily sharp eyes, content to stay laying under the table.

“Polish off the whole bottle already?” The barkeep has a slight laugh in his voice, looking her over like he’s almost impressed.

“Not quite,” she grunts out. She sounds a bit more feral than she’d like. “The fighter. Who is she?”

“The redhead? That’s Cait. Tommy calls her Little Bird, but if you want to keep all those pretty white teeth of yours where they are I’d advise against…Look, she lives here, fights the shitheads we have for clientele, shoots up with Psycho in her free time and thinks we don’t notice. Why the interest?” He leers at Mickey, and she notices just how many of his teeth are missing. “If you’re looking, she might be open to a little extracurricular, just gotta get the okay from Lonegan–” Mickey’s courtroom glare apparently still works to shut people up in the wasteland, as his sentence cuts off right there. “Okay, okay, put the claws away, scavver. Ain’t trying to get stabbed over a joke.”

Mickey shoots him one last dirty look over her shoulder as she walks back over to the table, scratching Dog behind the ear like he likes, and settling in to watch the next fight.

•••

The redheaded woman– Cait– performs in most of the fights, and Mickey has to admit it’s more of a performance than anything. It reminds her almost of when she and Natty would go to boxing matches before they’d had Shaun, except the crowd was somewhat rowdier, and the fights were somewhat bloodier. Also, usually in the old fights she’d been to, both of the parties were able to say with almost complete certainty that they’d be walking away from the fight at the end. If not walking, then at least… being carted away, or taken to the hospital. Something told her that most of the losers of these games weren’t going to be much longer for this world.

That being said, they were raiders, so she didn’t feel _that_ bad.  


Mickey watches Cait get sloppier and sloppier throughout the night, and yet at each new round, her bloodlust seems to be measuring at full. It has to be the Psycho, Mickey decides, again feeling like she should be more upset about the state of things than she is. Back before the bombs, seeing someone using so much of any sort of chem in such a short time (except for maybe ‘Tats, the night before a big exam in college) would make her worried. She supposes there’s no such thing as rehab in the apocalypse, and scrubs a hand down her face, wincing a bit as it catches on mangled tape she'd tried to apply to protect the stitches from the still healing wound across her nose and cheek. Thank whatever god was left that the Abernathys’d had rudimentary medical knowledge, or she'd be having a lot bigger scar than she knew she'd end up with.

Her Pip-Boy says it’s past ten, which is much later than she’d planned on staying. She glances up at the mess of shacks built inside the old theater, and tries to decide if staying the night with a bunch of raiders would be a better or worse option than leaving and trying to find a better place to hole up outside. After a few seconds she groans, hefting her pack and clicking her tongue at the dog, who looks at her lazily, like he couldn’t care less what decision she makes, but either way he’s a little irritated she’s making him get up. She reaches into the left side breast pocket on her jacket and fishes out one of the little morsels she’s taken to bribing him with, and he perks right up.

A loud bang draws her attention to the back of the theater as a raider knocks over one of the makeshift tables strewn about, and she sees a sharp-boned wastelander start to retreat back to the door they’d just closed. She’s not sure if the angular, peaky look to their oddly decorated face is due to hunger or fear; their bloodshot eyes dart back and forth between the several raiders advancing slowly upon them. The dog growls warily.

“Well, look who it is… you worthless, filthy, scuzz-assed waste of goddamn space, didn’t we tell you not to come the fuck back here?”

The wastelander’s head swivels, an almost dazed look on their paling face. “Tawno!” They wring their hands nervously, tittering slightly as their eyes growing almost impossibly large. One of them has a weird, slightly hazy look to it. It reflects the light back with an almost red hue, even less focused than the other. “Didn’t know you’d be round these parts, thought you were gonna uh, move on to uh, m-meaner pastures! Trust me, boss, Id’a been keepin’ outta your space if id’a been knowin’ you were here, honest…” Their already diminutive form seemed to shrink even smaller in the shadow of the looming raiders, voice creaky, squeaky, panicked. “Tawn? H-hey, compadre, I’m beggin’ ya, y’gotta believe me–”

Their words are cut off, as one of the raiders– Tawno?– lifts them by the front of their ratty shirt. “Listen here, _compadre_ ,” the wastelander’s gloved hands are scrabbling inneffectually at Tawn’s fist. “When I tells ya, keep your no-good-useless ass offa my turf, I mean, keep your no-good-useless ass offa my turf. I don’t wanna see your shitty carved-up face, I don’t wanna see your shitty goggles, or that creepy as all-hell mask of yours, I don’t even wanna see your shitty back running away from me. I tell you to keep your no-good-useless ass off my turf, I don’t wanna see a single shitty, sniveling, tweaky chem-head no-good-useless piece of you.” He shakes the scrawny scavver for emphasis, looking for all intents and purposes like a pre-war man rubbing a puppy’s nose in an accident.

“Lemme go boss, promise, you ain’t gonna see none of me ever again, promise boss, you got my word–”

“You think I’d take your word as bein’ worth _shit_? I got half a mind to bash your tweaker head in right the fuck now.”

Mickey’s had enough. Hell, she’s always liked an underdog, and she’s just this side of pissed off at having her exit from the Combat Zone cut off.

“What seems to be the issue, here, _compadres_?” She sneers out the last word mockingly, dragging her half-lidded eyes over the group, lip curled slightly in distaste.  
“None of your concern, scavver. Me and the boys just tryin’ to talk ol’ Gazza here outta challenging the Little Bird,” the wastelander– Gazza?– widens their eyes even farther, which Mickey would have thought impossible a few seconds ago, shaking their head a bit. He puts them down, and while their feet are touching the ground, they don’t seem to be any more stable than they were while they weren’t. Tawn claps them on the back, almost sending them to the ground, before one of the other raiders wrapped a friendly looking arm around their shoulders. “Crazy fucker just won’t let us talk her out of it, seems highly determined.”

The scavver, a woman apparently, though Mickey’s not sure how exactly they can tell under all the rags, and filth, and decorative scarring– an eye on her forehead, and some gnarled looking reminder of past hurt creeping up past the top of her gas mask– pales further, croaking out a sound a few times before words manage to come out. “Ha! W-well boys, I think ya might just have done the trick! D-don’t wanna fight that one no more… Think we’ll just, uh, go our separate ways, an’ forget this ever happened!” Her eyes slide around, reminding Mickey of the family dog the first time her parents had taken it to the vet.

“Oh, no, no. Don’t let lil ol’ me crush your dreams, Gaz.” The big raider slings his arm around the other side of the wastelander, starting to walk her down to the cage. “Ya wanna fight Cait, we’ll make sure ya fight Cait. Not sure why you’d get that thought in your silly lil noggin though,” he leans down closer to her face, “did you see how she beat that last one’s face inta pulp? I mean, if tha’s whatcher into, but sheesh!” Gaz’s feet scrabble at the scuffed floorboards weakly, still halfheartedly begging to be let go. “Hey! Tommy! Got some fresh mea–” Mickey doesn’t let him finish the sentence, having beaned him in the head with a shell casing she found laying on the ground. 

“Th’fuck? Lady, you really don’t wanna get involved in this.”

“Asshole, I really do. Put the scavver down, and back away slowly, and I don’t send another shell your way. Wouldn’t just be _throwing_ that one.” The dog growls again from her side, and she ruffles the top of his head affectionately. “My buddy here seems like he kinda hopes you don’t listen, but I don’t know if I’d go along with him.” Her heart is pounding, but she can’t tell if it’s the 200 years frozen housewife backpedaling, or this new Mickey (the one she doesn’t know very well yet, who wears roadsigns bent into armor, and carries around a shotglass salvaged from the wreckage of her old home, and lives in a goddamn _wasteland_ ) baring her teeth at a challenge. She’s kind of thinking it’s probably that last one, from how her fingers grip the shaft of the giant fuck-off sledgehammer she’d stolen off the corpse of one of the first people New Mickey had encountered in the shithole of a world she’d woken into. She sort of wonders if the cold from the cryo-chamber hadn’t messed with her head a little, sunk too deep into her and coated her heart. She hefts the super-sledge over one shoulder, cocking her hip out. “Maybe we could come to a… more agreeable solution?”

Tawn laughs, an ugly raucous sound that would remind her of crows, if she hadn’t loved crows. “That so? Maybe you’d rather be the one to go up against the Little Bird, huh?” He meets the eye of the other raider holding onto Gaz, and they let go of her at the same time, smirking as she falls on the floor and quickly scrambles away into one of the shacks along the walls, adjusting her odd mask as she goes. The dog looks after her, whining a little and wagging his tail.

“I didn’t come here for a fight, jackass. I came for a place to have a drink, which sucked, by the way,” she yells this last bit over her shoulder at the barkeep, “and sit down for a bit. I did that, now I’m leaving. Or trying to, but wouldn’tcha know it, there’s this group of shitwit halfbrains standing around in front of the door with their thumbs up their asses, blocking the goddamn way.”

She’s so incensed, so impassioned in her tirade, that she’s almost tunnel-visioned, letting out all the anger she’d been bottling up since stumbling out of the vault. It’s the first time she’s let any of it out (excepting her mislaid anger at poor Blake Abernathy, that first confusing day), and if she’s honest with herself, the anger is welcome. Its heat distracts her, melts a little of the cold feeling she still hasn’t managed to shake despite the awful heat of the wastes. She grins savagely, taking a breath to let loose the next explosive torrent of razor sharp words she can feel clawing their bloody way up her throat. Out of the corner of her eye she sees movement, and she whips around, brandishing her sledge hammer with a feral growl.

“Hey, no fighting outside the ring!” the bartender protests. Mickey hears him, somewhere in the back of her mind. That doesn’t stop her from sending a wild swing at the raider behind her, poised with a needle ready to jab into a gap in her armor. The thought drifts through her mind that it probably wasn’t a good idea to turn her back; she hears the telltale yelp of a raider as the dog latches onto someone’s leg a split second before feeling a sharp crack against her head that she recalls vaguely from that one wild night in college where that bitch Hattie Kirschmeyer broke a bottle over her head trying to impress the bikers at the bar they’d been at. She turns around just in time to catch a brass-knuckled fist to the face, and one more thought flits through her mind before her eyes close.  


_I really gotta stop getting myself into these situations._

•••

Waking up fuzzyheaded in strange locations wasn't something _new_ to Mickey. Waking up fuzzyheaded in strange locations is something that _should_ have been new to Mickey. College was a wild time. In any case, the current state of things was slightly worrying. The last thing Mickey could remember was a group of wasteland thugs harassing a smaller person, and Mickey being... less than sober and quite annoyed, then Dog barking, and then... taking a fist to the face? That would certainly explain the bruised feeling; the wet stickiness was probably the stitches across her nose and cheek popping open. Lovely.

"Godfuckin... damnit," she groans, cracking open one swollen eye after the other. "Why's this... I gotta knock this trend." She struggles to sit up, looking around, and realizes she's not talking to anyone. No one's there. "Dog?" She's in a large area, covered with stained, dry rotting curtains. There are blood spatters on the floor. Mickey takes a mental inventory, and notices several things at once: 

1\. She's not wearing any of her armor, stripped down to her vault suit, shoeless.

2\. Her pip boy is gone.

3\. She's been graciously relieved of all her weapons.

Struggling to her feet, one hand pinching the bridge of her puffed up nose to try and alleviate the pressure on her swollen face, Mickey is thrown completely off guard when a spotlight shines directly into her face; this situation she's landed herself in is reminding her more and more of her first meeting with the Abernathys, but she's getting the feeling that this time she won't be joining forces with another kindly family of farmers with a well-justified fear of outsiders. 

"Ladies and gentlemen!" the raspy voice draws out the L for emphasis, chuckling a bit at the end. "And scumbags of any kind. You know what you're here for today, just like every day." A roar goes up from the room beyond, and Mickey realizes she's still in the Combat Zone. The curtains must be blocking off the rest of the room, while she's locked in the cage. As if cued by her lightbulb moment, the curtains begin to draw back, letting in the whirling stage lights and other spotlights pointing from all directions. "You're here to see two scrappers beat the shit out of each other, you're here for the fun, for the pain, for the blood. You're here for the _show_!"

"God. Damn. It." 

"Tonight we have... a special guest. You'll recognize that specific shade of blue. Yes, friends and paying patrons, tonight it looks like we've got ourselves a bonafide _vault dweller_!" The crowd roars again, some booing mixed in. "Yes, yes, I know. Those stuck up sons of bitches that keep us locked out, keeping all their shit tight away from us miserable fucks on the surface. Well, boys and ghouls, tonight we've got a chance to show one of those pricks what they deserve for crawling out of their little holes, tonight we've got one of them going head to head with the one, the only, our own Little Bird, Cait!" 

Mickey's blood runs a little cold at that. It's not that she doesn't think she can take her, she's been in plenty of fights, dating to even before the bombs fell. She and Natty had been part of a kickboxing league, and before those classier days, she'd been in more than a few drunken bar brawls. None of her pre-war tussles had been the kind of gritty, all or nothing, no holds barred sock-em-ups like she'd seen here, though. She squints her eyes, trying to see past the bright dancing lights to the announcer, or even just something beyond the stage. No luck.

The clamoring of the crowd seems to have died down momentarily, and she wonders what's going on. 

"I said, the one, _the only_ , our own _Little Bird_!" The announcer sounds a tad annoyed, now. "Cait, you chem-head piece of shit, where are you? I'm trying to announce a goddamn show, you've gotta meet your marks sweetheart. Get the fuck out there!"

Cait finally backs her way onto the stage, chucking a canister of jet behind her at the announcer's booth. "Ah, piss off, Tommy. I'm on me fuckin' way, ain't I?" 

"And here she is, the star of our own little show! Ready to kick some Vaultie ass, babe?" Cait just flips him off before cracking her knuckles and advancing menacingly. Mickey backs away as slowly as she can, trying to keep her distance until the fight starts. She's seen Cait fight all night (is it still night?) and knows that she's quick, and she's going to have to try to stay out of reach for as long as possible. "Watch out, boys, Vaultie's trying to run! Don'cha wanna fight, Vaultie? Seemed pretty set on it earlier."

"What can I say, pal, that was then, this is now," Mickey yells to the disembodied voice, nearly pressed to the fenced in edge of the stage at this point. "'Sides, I never wanted to fight your Bird. I wanted to fuck up those scuzzy twatsocks that wouldn't let me out of the fuckin' joint earlier!" That wasn't exactly what happened, but Mickey figured making herself angry was better than letting herself be scared, so she tried to work herself up.

"Woah, Vaultie's got a mouth on 'er!" 

The lights start spinning faster, whirling about in a dizzying fashion while the crowd starts chanting impatiently, stamping their feet and pounding their fists in time. 

"Alright kiddies, brawl time starts.... _now_! Ready, set, _let's see some fucking blood_!"

Before she knows it, Mickey's dodging a first wild swing from Cait. Retreating to the opposite corner, she's awfully glad she'd let Dolly talk her into backwards jogging up the hill on their college campus every night for a semester. She offhandedly wonders if Dolly made it through the bomb, and almost gets swiped again. Dragging her mind back to the task at hand, she continues her probably-ridiculous-looking backwards skitter about the ring. 

"Psst! Hey, Cait! Yeah, listen here, notice how I didn't call you that name you don't like? Yeah, see, I don't really wanna--woah _fuck!_ \-- Listen-- _hey!_ \-- I don't wanna fight you! What say you we uh, come to an agreement?" Cait doesn't appear to be listening. Cait appears to _want_ to fight. That's fine, Mickey wasn't really counting on it working anyway, which doesn't mean she's not going to keep trying to convince her to lay down her arms, in a painfully literal sense. " _Cait!_ Come on, dude, I... really? Can you like, lay off for approximately one second so I can talk to you?" 

"Little Bird advancing on Vaultie, but somehow that slippery fuck keeps getting out of the way! Looks like someone doesn't wanna get their ass beat! Good luck on that one, Vaultie. Our Caity-girl always gets 'em in the end! Maybe if someone offers her some encouragement she'll stop trying to run!" Mickey's backed herself completely against the wall this time, and she feels something sharp stab her right in the flesh between her neck and shoulder... what the fuck? She looks over to see a massive syringe sticking into her vault suit, and has enough time to think _that's probably no good_ before a hand reaches through the cage to depress the plunger, shooting the entire syringe worth of whatever-the-fuck into her system.

"Got 'er, Tommy! Shot the bitch up with some Psychojet!" That's definitely no good.

"Haha! Shouldn't take long now!"

Mickey feels her pulse climb higher and higher, vision pulsating red at the edges, before finally bleeding into her entire field of sight. It's as if the world has slowed to a crawl, and all she can feel is... anger. Her fear is melting away, slowly being replaced by an insatiable thirst for blood, pain, destruction. She croaks out a strangled scream, before turning around to face her opponent. The muffled yells of the crowd are asking for blood.

It's only polite to deliver.

**Author's Note:**

> Mickey, baby. What have you gotten yourself into now?  
> Updating feels good, fresh, organic. Hit that mf Kudos button, I aim to update biweekly.


End file.
